But does BPL have that sort of money available?
If BPL is not bringing in at least $3600 a year to cover a dedicated server than RJ should just sell the Services to somebody that can properly run this service.
If the largest backpacking website in the world is not even making that little amount of money – given the activity of this website – then really, he should pass it along to somebody like myself or others here at BPL that have decades of our lives invested into running operations such at this.
Lets just pad that 3600 up to 5000 to cover other issues, we are only talking about 200 annual members per year to cover the very basic of expenses for day to day operations of this website. Does BPL not have that many annual members? Yes, there are other expenses (moderators??, part time developer ??, domain fees – all of about 8 bucks a year, ssl cert = 30 bucks a year, business license, no idea what this is in montana, a couple hundred bucks a year??) so really, what kind of overhead does this website have that cannot generate 5k a year.
I run a website that has tens of millions of verified page views a month and has members from almost every nation on the planet, and minus my own time it costs less then 5000 bucks a year to keep it operational. It generates me 10 times that much, and I do so without a single bit of advertisement on the website.
My point here is that there is just no reason that BPL should not be in a position to be able to keep their hardware and software up to date based on the amount of members that I see here.
I am by no means intending to be critical of RJ or Rodger or anybody else. It is just that the math does not seem to make any sense – as I have said in the past.
RJ – if you ever see this and are interested in yapping about how to potentially resolve some of these issues, by all means, lets talk… you have my email address (well, the bpl database does).
